Observing, reflecting, designing.

October 2007

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“I’ve written previously about using an envisaging team to scout out ahead. Not to design the solution but to understand the problem space … and report this back in a coherent fashion to the rest of the team. “

I’ve got another research project looking for participants – do you fit the bill or know someone who does?

We’re looking for people between the ages of 18-29 (guys and girls) who currently single and who use social networking tools like FaceBook, MySpace etc. to stay in touch with friends and who have either met – in real life – someone who they first met on a social networking site OR attended an event they found out about from a social networking website.

You need to be available some time on Thursday or Friday (1-2 November) somewhere within reasonable striking distance to central London – we’ll find a time and a place that it mutually convenient to meet.

This fun and simple study will take between 30-45 minutes of your time – we’re just interested in your opinions, this is not a test

If you’re interested in participating, or if you have any other questions – please email me!

We don’t talk about accessibility much here (because there are people who are much better at talking about it than I am), but I have come across two really interesting posts lately that I think you should take a look at if you haven’t already, and if you’re in any doubt as to whether – as a UX person – accessibility is part of your responsibility.

Over at SitePoint [Why Accessibility – Because it’s our job!] James makes it clear that he thinks that accessibility and usability are intricately entwined. More importantly, I think, he re-iterates that in most cases, it takes not that much more effort to make a site accessible in the first place.

They are really quite inspirational and make it clear that even in the face of significant physical restrictions, peole are able to do pretty amazing things with their computers… if we design and code in such a way that allows them. In fact – they manage to do some pretty amazing stuff in the face of some pretty crazy design and coding as well.

Yes, it is true that many clients that you work with will not have a very active interest in accessibility. I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve been told that ‘blind people are not in our target audience’. Not to start in on the fact that making your site accessible is about much more than just people with visual impairment….

There once was the perception that making your website accessible was a time consuming and expensive exercise. That is far from the case. The fact is, a standards compliant site is most of the way to being accessible – this is the way we should be coding our sites anyways!

There are still lots of ways for designers to screw up accessibility, and I think that a lack of exposure to how our work behaves for people using assistive technologies means that we don’t understand the impact of the decisions we make sometimes.

Developing an understanding and awareness of simple ways to avoid common accessibility problems, and ensuring that, as we design, we spend just a little time checking our work to make sure that we’re making life easier and not unnecessarily difficult will provide lots of benefits for very little investment.

As the advocates for user experience I think it’s important that we’re advocating for *everyone’s* experience and perhaps doing a little bit more than just whispering the word ‘accessibility’ in a meeting early on and allowing it to be just as easily dismissed. And not just because of the potential legal implications, but because it’s our job.

(a quick definition, given that I’ve discovered that English is at least three separate languages: to rock out = to perform exceptionally well and give great satisfaction, as say, a rock band might ‘rock out’ on stage’.)

These days when I’m doing any kind of user research, rather than going to my secret consultant place and doing that consultant magic that results in a presentation of research findings, I much prefer to get into a big room with clean walls and several hundred sticky notes and my clients/project team, and to work out the research findings collaboratively.

Am I just being lazy and getting my clients to do my work? Well kind of…. but with good reason!

Why do it? Well, there are a few reasons.

Firstly, to combat what I think is probably the single most frustrating outcome of a research project – having your results either not accepted or immediately shelved, meaning that all of your work has come to pretty much nothing. By involving your clients in the process, they have a stake in defining exactly what the findings are, what is important, what is not. When you’re presenting the findings, you (or even better, the project team) are presenting the *team* findings, not just your own.

Secondly, to educate your client. To help them to understand that there is actually a rigorous process that occurs between the interviews or focus groups or whatever your research activity is, and when the findings magically appear in the presentation. To allow them to use the tools themselves when it is appropriate.

Thirdly, to get better results. Having your client with you will ensure that you apply appropriate rigor in reviewing research data. Not to say you don’t do this by yourself as well but it’s great to have the extra incentive.

Back in the late 1970’s, the US government commissioned a study to look at effective group decision making. In the study, they asked 30 military experts to study intelligence data and try to construct the enemy’s troop movements.

Each expert analyzed the data and compiled a report. The commission then “scored” each report on how well it reported the actual troop movements. They found that the average military expert only got 7 out of a 100 elements correct.

Each expert then reviewed all of the other experts’ reports and rewrote their initial assessment. The average accuracy for these revised reports was 79 out of a 100.

What was different between the first report and the second? The experts didn’t have any new information. All they had were the perspectives of the other experts. When they added those perspectives to their own, their accuracy increased ten-fold.

It’s been my experience that if you can get your project team members (and their associated and diverse expertise) involved in the research analysis process, then you will most definitely get more accurate and more useful research findings.

So, how do you do it?

I’m sure there are a whole bunch of ways to do collaborative research analysis but I’ve gotten the most success from the following approach.

Firstly – encourage as many team members as possible to observe the research (if possible). Give them sticky notes and markers, give them the rules for writing sticky notes (one concept per sticky, clear handwriting in capital letters) and ideas about what kind of things should go onto the sticky notes. Don’t worry about the fact that you’ll have duplicates. Get them to write as many stickies as they can.

Then, when it comes time for analysis, you want a big room with lots of clean wall space. Plaster the walls with white or brown paper (whatever is easiest to get hold of) so you can move the stickies around en masse with ease. Then it’s time to get stuck into the process.

start by defining the research question(s) – you should have done this before you undertook the research so this should just be a refresher. I like to get them written up and positioned somewhere highly visible in the room. This is what we’re trying to discover, the questions we’re trying to answer. They help maintain our focus.

do a large scale affinity sort (follow steps 4, 5 and 6 from the KJ Technique). I know that this process looks completely chaotic at first… it is. Trust the process though, it actually does work. What happens is that you end up with lots of big groups with very vague names and some duplicates around the room. After you’ve done the very first sort, pick a big group and start dissecting it – look for groups within groups, and make sure that the group labels are actually meaningful in relation to your research questions. This is the tough part – you need to keep driving the group to keep seeking themes and meanings within the groups… and to sort and re-sort, and have lots of long, pedantic discussions – until finally the room full of stickies is completely sorted. (You can deal with the duplicate issue now by sticking duplicates one on top of the other so that they are not over-represented within groups).

prioritise your findings. As a group – review all of the findings that you’ve come up with (each group is now a ‘finding’), and start grouping your groups together based on their relevance to your research question. You might have meta-group headings that are something like ‘Interesting but out of scope’ and ‘In Scope – High Priority’, ‘In Scope – Low Priority’ etc.

then finally, go back to your research questions and work out what you’ve found. Based on the research you’ve done in this project, what are the answers to your questions?

Be sure to photograph all of your work, and then instead of the dreaded task of writing a ‘research report’, your job is then to gather all of this information into a digestible format for the team to use going forward.

And, of course, because they’ve actually been involved in the process, they’re much more likely to actually use it. Yay!

What do you reckon? Have you tried working like this? How did it go? Any other techniques that you’ve found work well? I’d be interested to hear what you think! :)

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About me

My name is Leisa Reichelt. I am the Head of User Research at the Government Digital Service in the Cabinet Office.

I lead a team of great researchers who work in agile, multidisciplinary digital teams to help continuously connect the people who design products with the people who will use them and support experimentation and ongoing learning in product design.

If you're interested in working with me or would like to talk more please email me